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Mint 4.0 seems to be doing everything except allowing me to access my Western Digital external hard drive. Normally, installing ntfs-3g cures this but not today. I can't even open the drive read only, let alone create files or folders etc. Am I missing something obvious or is there a solution everyone knows but me?

I don't have a link but I read an Article about WD purposely making some of their external Hard Drives compatable with windows only

If your lucky and it won't mount because it wasn't properly unmounted previously from either Linux or Windows, you might be able to force mount it, though force mounting might cause data loss, so if you have anything important on it i would transfer the files off with windows or something

Force mounting hasn't worked so far but I'll give it another try. This drive was perfectly accessible with Ubuntu 7.04 but not with 7.10. It was also ok with the Mint and Ubuntu Live cds but not when installed. It's not life threatening but it's an annoying little quirk.

iironjade wrote:The problem appears to have been solved. How, I don't know, but Mint is now running perfectly. Thanks for your suggestions.

Do you have a dual boot machine with either XP or Vista? In that case if you hot unplug the external hdd when you are using MS OS you get this message when you boot into linux. If you encounter the same problem once again, try booting into XP (or Vista) and use Safely Remove feature (after having connected your external HDD to your pc) in order to disconnect your external HDD. After that boot into linux. I had the same problem several times because I used to hot unplug my external HDDs.